Teachers preparing children for the future workplace

Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome“…Whether for work, errands or recreation, driving to the store is a large part of daily car use… students imagined rolling retail [Autonomous Vehicle] units delivering inventory to customer doors at the push of a button. In cases where vehicles were small and full inventory was not an option to transport, others saw businesses built on rolling virtual demo centers. Along with being a means to pick up goods, some saw Autonomous Vehicles as rolling storage devices, ready to deliver what you want, when you want it with the help of proprietary mobile apps.” — frog, design and strategy firmLearn More on Designmind >

#Not Awesome“Further, with women” and family as go-to cultural corollaries, studies show, terrifyingly, that these biases are being adopted by artificial intelligence, too. Calling motherhood a woman’s job only serves to keep a woman in her place. The priorities of mothers who work outside the home are often questioned. It’s as if women are forced to choose between ambition (or simply earning a living wage) and family.” — Karen Rinaldi, Author Learn More on The New York Times >

What we’re reading.

1/ By the time today’s young children are old enough to work, automation will have changed the labor market in ways none of us can predict. Thankfully, the best teachers are coming up with creative new ways to prepare kids for the future workplace — however it may look. Learn More on The New York Times >

2/ With their massive data sets and powerful algorithms, companies like Amazon and Uber are “effectively making their own rules in the marketplace, beating back new market entrants,” and damaging individual welfare. Learn More on Fast Company >

3/ Disney Research builds a deep learning system to track moviegoers’ facial reactions to see if they are bored or excited, and to predict how future scenes will make them feel. If privacy advocates allow, they’ll use the data to make better movies in the future. Learn More on CBC >

4/ Spreadsheets didn’t replace humans, and we shouldn’t expect machine learning to either — it doesn’t yield exact answers, it reduces uncertainty around different risks and will augment human decision making. Learn More on the Wall Street Journal >

5/ An artist just transformed a simple AI system that learns to get better at Tic-Tac-Toe through experience into a beautiful piece of wooden furniture. Learn More on We Make Money Not Art >

6/ The possibility of building a single intelligent system that outpaces human intelligence is still up for debate, but there are a few steps we can take that might prevent catastrophe, just in case it is possible. Learn More on thinking wires >

7/ Losing jobs to AI poses major risks to the global economy, but one could argue that robots aren’t even improving our productivity as much as we had hoped. Learn More on Tim Harford >